Lately I’ve been reading the posts on the web about the Dell Mini 9. Hacking perfectly good hardware (especially inexpensive hardware) is always fun, and the Gizmodo article How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook sounded especially intriguing and got me really jonsing. I went to Dell Outlet and found a Mini 9 with a 16GB SSD “hard drive” and 1GB of memory. It had windows XP on it (which would not have been my choice – it also comes with Ubuntu), was missing the optional built-in web cam, but for $200 I figured it was worth it. As I placed my order, apparently I forgot to read all the details because well, it’s pink.
Somewhere between ordering and receiving the “netbook” I decided that before going to OS X it might be nice to have a Ubuntu machine again so I started reading the posts – hopefully what follows will make this process easier (although it was pretty straight-forward) for someone else.
The first thing I had to do was download the .iso from the Ubuntu site – you can find current .iso files here.
Next I had to create a Live USB of the .iso (the Dell Mini 9 does not have an optical drive). This step proved to be the most difficult of the whole process. Most of the links that you find on the web deal with how to do it from a linux (usually Ubuntu) machine. I am a mac user and didn’t have a linux machine at my disposal. I eventually found a comment in a post for a piece of software that makes Live USB’s from Windows. Since the Mini 9 was coming with windows this looked promising – and indeed worked like a charm. <evil geek>Plus there was something sinister and great about Windows creating the thing that would eventually destroy it.</evil geek> This post was helpful in the Live USB creation How to make a live USB.
After creating the Live USB – it was pretty much restart, go into the BIOS, select boot from USB and sit back for the install. Everything worked post install aside from sound. A quick search and I found this post – Getting sound to work – followed the instructions and after a reboot – sure enough, it all worked.
I want to try syncing an iPod with this little machine so I installed GTKPod via this post How to use gtkpod to manage your iPod in Ubuntu but I haven’t actually tried it yet. Maybe another post.
